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It was surprising to find that these major brands expected customers to put up with clunky, out-dated web forms and a difficult purchase journey.

But Cathay Pacific was clearly already aware of the issue and has just unveiled a new responsive site as part of a wider rebranding exercise that seeks to present a “simpler, cleaner, more customer-focused Cathay Pacific brand.”

I’d like to claim that my blog post spurred it all, but it actually comes after 18 months of planning.

At the next stage (page three of seven) Cathay offers passengers a quite baffling range of options.

There are six different choices ranging from £631.36 to £2,459.36, and this is only in economy. What if I wanted to fly business class?

Each economy class has slightly different criteria relating to upgrades, cancellations and ‘no show charges’, which doesn’t quite fit with the aim of creating a simpler customer experience.

It’s also at this stage that passengers have to choose the time of their departure, with the results now including scarcity indicators to create a fear of loss.

There are four more pages in the booking process so I won’t bore you with each one, but suffice to say that it retains the simple, clean aesthetic and is a vast improvement on the old site.

Costs are clearly presented upfront so passengers know what they’re paying for and won’t be fearful of hidden extras.

Cathay also offers a guest checkout and only asks customers for very basic personal information. The use of white space and large text fields means forms are very simple to complete.

The downside…

Sadly it appears that Cathay hasn’t yet got round to optimising the booking process for mobile, which rather defeats the purpose.

Having performed the initial search on mobile, users are then expected to select their flight and complete a seven-stage payment process using a desktop site.

Clearly nobody is going to bother doing this so hopefully Cathay Pacific has plans to roll out an upgrade soon.

In fairness it’s unlikely that many people will actually convert on mobile, but it would have made sense to make the results page responsive at least so people can check their options before making a purchase on desktop.

In conclusion…

Cathay Pacific’s new site is a vast improvement on the old version, though that isn’t particularly difficult to achieve.

But even so the airline deserves praise for recognising and addressing the issue while many of its competitors are happy to make do with out-dated, difficult websites.

The failure to optimise the flight search and booking process for mobile is a huge issue, but I would suspect that Cathay will make this upgrade at a later date.

It could be that the company has adopted a test-and-learn approach so later iterations will include improved functionality.

I certainly hope this is the case, or Cathay Pacific will have already fallen short of its rebranding goals.

Recommended

Store locator tools are hugely important for multichannel retailers, with their importance increasing due to the consumer shift to mobile and our reliance on digital maps for directions.

This was a point hammered home to me over the weekend when I was hopelessly wandering the streets of Catford trying to find a Tesco Superstore.

Store locator tools seem a very basic part of modern web design, yet clearly not all sites manage to get it right.

The importance of giving people useful, local information is further underlined by data published by Google.

It shows that 40% of mobile searches have local intent, while three out of four mobile searches trigger follow-up actions, whether that be further research, a store visit, a phone call, a purchase or word-of-mouth sharing.

With this in mind I’ve taken a look to see which brands have great mobile store locator tools, but first here’s a look at a few features that need to be included.

Following the relaunch of its ecommerce site at the end of 2013, Halfords online sales have risen 13.7% from the same time last year.

As reported in Internet Retailing last week, Halfords’ online sales represented 12.2% of its total retail sales. Conversion rates have risen by 19% and 92% of online orders were collected in store through its click and collect service.

Impressive figures that certainly position Halfords as a successful multichannel retailer, but what makes the Halfords online experience particularly conducive to improving its revenue?

Recently we’ve featured Halfords in various articles related to ecommerce – social customer service, guest checkouts click and collect – and to be honest this retailer hasn’t come out particularly well.

Companies are pouring billions of dollars a year into social media and influencer marketing campaigns, many of which target consumers on Facebook-owned Instagram, in an effort to parlay social engagement into sales.